ARGENTINA AND ITS CHACO* 

 By Herman Kxuge. 



The term Chaco means all the lands formerly controlled by the 

 once powerful Guaranie Indians before the Spanish conquest. 

 The name first used was Yacu, which is the name for the wild 

 turkey ; for in former times they were abundant. Gradually the 

 name changed to Chacu, then to Chaco. Thus Paraguay, Ura- 

 guay and Bolivia have their Chacos. The Chaco in Argentina 

 extends through the northern, northeastern and northwestern 

 parts. Chaco does not necessarily mean timber land, but the 

 timber land is in the Chaco. The belts of timber cannot be dis- 

 tinctly defined, but they lie more or less in the river districts of the 

 Parana, Paraguay, Pilcomayo and Bermejo. This makes it easy 

 to subdivide the Chaco into districts. Of these, the part called 

 "Rio Bermejo Chaco" is best known by the writer. This tract 

 lies east of Chile and South of Bolivia at an elevation of from 500 

 feet to 4,000 feet above the sea level. 



The entire Chaco seems to contain the more important wood? 

 distributed over the whole, such as cedro, quebracho, urendel or 

 unrendey and lapacho. Yet of the less common woods each part 

 of the Chaco shows its peculiar distinctive trees. Pine is said 

 to be found along the Andes from the Strait of Magellan to 

 Bogota, Columbia, in more or less quantities, but there is no re- 

 liable information. In Brazil, on the head waters of the Uraguay 

 river, a good kind of pine exists which in small quantities reaches 

 the mills at Buenos Ayres. South America is still in such an un- 

 explored condition that the best one can say is : there is timber 

 here and timber there, without being able to give an idea of 

 the extent of the tracts. Argentina, taken as a whole, has not 

 a great amount of timber, but what there is is of the finest kinds, 

 very little strictly ornamental wood but the best of hard woods. 

 There are immense tracts of land that are untrodden by white men 

 and the government is making no effort to have it surveyed. In 

 the Bermejo region the timber runs from 2,000 feet to 15,000 feet 



* This article was published in the American Lumberman of November 

 13, after having been submitted for publication in the Quarterly. 



